What Advice Do You Have For Future Ophthalmologists?
Check out the perspectives and ideas from four generations of actively practicing ophthalmologists and thought leaders in their field.
TRADITIONALIST
Dr. Manus Kraff: Well, the problem is it was much easier for us than it is for the young ophthalmologists today. For us, we could go to a bank and borrow $50,000, outfit a complete office, and hang up your shingle, so to speak and then you had a practice in a year. People can't do that today for many, many reasons. The government for one, all the insurances, and there's not much patient pay. It's a different thing. So I think the most important thing, as you mentioned in the beginning, is to pick something that you love to do. Today there's so many fields like genetics or pharmaceuticals with the eye. These fields weren't even working in existence then. So, today just pick something you like and study that. If you don't like it after you start a fellowship, leave it and do something else, but the main thing is pick something you can see yourself doing for the major part of your professional career. You can't go solo anymore. It's just the economics of the situation. You can't go to a big city. You might be able to do it in a rural community, in North or South Dakota, or Montana, or people without a large population. With a large population, you just can't do it anymore.
BABY BOOMERS
Dr. Ming Wang: When looking to hire a new partner, what we were looking for at the end of the day, is the fundamental focus on patients. Technology comes and goes, people come and go, but the fundamental essence of medicine, which is a patient centric approach, that will remain unchanged. Now, once again you may say, “Dr. Wang, this sounds like a theoretical philosophical viewpoint.” No, it manifests actually what you do every day for me and Dr. Frenkel. For example, as I said, at the end of the day, it's not what you feel is most important, it's not what you think is most important as a doctor, it is what the patients feel is most important. Give you one example, the doctor would walk into a room and say, “Hey, Mr. Smith, good to see you, I have all the time in the world, just tell me what your problem is,” but the doctor is standing there the entire time. That body language tells the patient, “no, I really don't have time for you, I'm ready to get out.” So it's the focus, the body language, emotion-to-connection. So my advice to the surgeons out there looking for partners in the future is, find someone who can fundamentally be on the same wavelength as you. As for us, the most important practice for the mind is a patient centric approach.
Dr. Nelson Preschel: You need a coach. You're probably not gonna find a coach in the same market where you are working because it's cut throat and nobody wants to coach you. So, you have to find someone that you admire, that you like, perhaps an attending from your residency years you met or someone who's in private practice, who's doing well, but you have to pick a coach that can help well. That person has to be willing to help you, and to answer questions, and to guide you through the first years. Then you have to read the right books and the right articles. You know, up until I started my own practice, I was reading ophthalmology, but if you're gonna start private practice, you've got to stop reading ophthalmology, you've got to start reading about the business of ophthalmology. There's one book that should be like a Bible, to anyone that's going into private practice. It's called a "Little Green Book of Ophthalmology". John Pinto has compiled pretty much everything you could think of about how to run a private practice. That should be something they have to read from cover to cover. So invest in preparing yourself for the battle because that's what it is in my opinion, yeah.
Dr. Larry Patterson: I think if I was going to boil it down to one thing, it would be to be willing to work. I mean, if you want to get out of residency and just get a salary position for the rest of your life and show up for work and see the patients and then spend the rest of your time with your family and friends, that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but don't anticipate having those upper echelons of salary. If you want to have a really good salary, if you want to make what some of the top ophthalmologists are making; you're going to have to work. You're going to have to become a part of a business and eventually hopefully buy in and have some skin in the game even though you may not have to work quite as hard as the original guy did who built the practice.
GENERATION X
Dr. Laura Periman: I'm very encouraging for new ophthalmologists and seasoned ophthalmologists to go ahead and go solo. Try the private practice thing. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and urban legends about how hard it is to open your practice, and I bought into that narrative for a long time. I was like, “Oh I don't know enough to own my own practice.” Well, you can learn it. If you're smart enough to get through medical school, you can learn how to operate a business. It's a steep learning curve. I've made mistakes, no question, but there's nothing quite like working for yourself, and the freedom and the latitude you have in making the decisions because doctors do have excellent judgment and we do have the patient's best interest at heart. The best way to achieve that is to be the one making the policies as the leader of your group.
Dr. Himani Goyal: I think the most important thing when deciding whether to joi a team, regardless of location, regardless of what the practice is like in that current day, is to know that you can work with the people that you're going to join and feel like you can be with them for a long time and build a team. One of the things I didn't know going into practice, was that many people don't stay with the practice that they first join, and I think knowing that kinda takes some of the pressure off. You're not going to know everything until you actually get into it and sometimes the things that you're looking for when you're graduating from residency, or fellowship, are actually different from the things that you want several years later. So if you can be with someone, it's very, very nerve wracking to be out there on your own, initially, for most of us. If you feel like you can actually continue this path from med school; we're students, we're residents, we have attendings, we have our seniors, we have our fellows, we have our mentors, and then all of a sudden, hey, am I going to be by myself? That shouldn't be, that should be a continuation. Like the practice that you join, you should be okay and know, “These are going to be my new mentors, these are going to be my teammates, these are going to be my friends.” So, I think that's the priority to be able to find a team that you will fit into. I think that's a priority for a practice looking for a new partner too, or a new associate, for them to be able to work with this person. And that's key and then knowing that it may not be your last place, just mentally kind of knowing that, hey, things can change in the future. And the third, I think, being able to have independence within that group to practice the things that you want. That's what I think, because you need space to grow, but you also kind of need someone to be there for you sometimes to hold your hand if you need it, in some moments.
MILLIENNIALS
Dr. Jillian Chong: You have to feel like you get along with the people you're working with, ‘cause, I think a lot of times we forget about that. When we're coming out of residency or coming out of fellowship, we think, oh, you want to know that there's this volume or this much call, or what the salary is, or something like that. You forget that you're hoping to commit, so you’re working with these people for as long as your career goes, as long as their careers are going. So, it's really important, that's even more important in a job, than it is in fellowship. They tell you all the time that you shouldn't go to do the fellowship if you don't like the people there, or it will be miserable for you and this is the rest of your life. The other thing that I think that was really important that people told me was, it's a huge decision. But I think for 50% of people, their first job isn't their last. So, you're going to be deciding between a lot of great places and it's an extremely exciting time to be an ophthalmologist. There are going to be a lot of great opportunities. But, you know, when you pick one, you don't have to worry that you're going to be looking back with regrets because your career's just starting. So, A. there's a lot of good options out there, B. you’ve got to like the people you're working with, and C. you know you're making a commitment that you hope is going to be forever, but it doesn't have to be.
